Archimedes Palimpsest

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a palimpsest on parchment, in which an otherwise unknown work of the ancient mathematician, physicist, and engineerArchimedes of Syracuse, who lived in the third century BC, was written in the 10th century. In the 12th century it was imperfectly erased in order that a liturgical text could be written on the parchment, and Archimedes' work is still legible today. It was a book of nearly 90 pages before being made a palimpsest of 177 pages; the older leaves were folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book. In 1906 it was published by the Danishphilologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854-1928), and shortly thereafter it was translated into English by Thomas Heath. Before that it was not widely known among either mathematicians or historians of mathematics.

Historian Reviel Netz of Stanford University, with technical assistance from several persons at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has been trying to fill in gaps in Heiberg's account. In Heiberg's time, much attention was paid to Archimedes' brilliant use of infinitesimals to solve problems about areas, volumes, and centers of gravity. Less attention was given to the Stomachion, a problem treated in the Palimpsest that appears to deal with a children's puzzle. Netz has shown that Archimedes found that the number of ways to solve the puzzle is 17,152. This is perhaps the most sophisticated work in the field of combinatorics in classical antiquity.

In 1998 the ownership of the palimpsest was disputed in federal court in New York in the case of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem versus Christie's, Inc. The plaintiff contended that the palimpsest had been stolen from one of its monasteries in the 1920s. Judge Kimba Wood decided in favor of Christie's Auction House on laches grounds, and the palimpsest was sold for $2 million.

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